Re: Misspelled domain name scam
ILONA JERABEK <ilona_at_queendom.com> WROTE:
>I would like to get your take on this I am sure it has
>happened to you. A client of ours complained the other
>day that he typed in our domain name, queendom.com and
>got a pile of junk. It turns out he mistyped the
>name and put quendom.com (forgot the second "e").
<snip>
>Does anybody know what can be done about this? How
>widespread is it? Do you agree that it affects the
>industry in general?
It is wide spread and there is nothing really illegal
about it. If your client holds a trademark and it is
a misspelling of the trademark, you can make noise.
But if they just have a domain and didn't take all of
the variations, there isn't a real lot they can do.
You could try to argue that they are confusing the
public, etc... but there is no real meat behind it
the way there is with a trademark claim.
The best bet is to register all of the misspellings
of your domain names. We have clients with 50-60
domains, all misspellings of the main name, all
pointing to the main site.
Is this a high traffic site? Are you losing a lot
of traffic to this?
I tried the misspelling.... Holy Pop-Up Windows,
Batman!
You can try sending a nasty letter. You can even
try lawyers. But you have be practical and think
(1) how much of a problem is it, and
(2) how much do you want to spend to fix it.
Christopher Ulrich
Received on Tue May 08 2001 - 11:25:19 CDT
